I'm pretty sure I remember Tomorrow's World telling me that everyone was going to be video calling in the near future from the phone in the hall. I'm pretty sure I even tried a BT video phone. Didn't beardy - I don't like fuckwits - I don't like myself - Alan Sugar try peddling one? From what I remember they were all shit balls. It was like having a conversation through one of those gate intercom things. Only you didn't have the godly power to open your footballers wives style gates in front of your visitor. But it wasn't just the poor technology was it? No one seemed interested in showing themselves to their telephone counterpart. But now we have a front facing camera on nearly everything and it feels pretty normally to video call people. It's not like I'll click the video button all the time - me post shower, you know just kicking back isn't a sight I wish to share with the world and I'm sure the world doesn't want it either. But it's certainly good for communicating with family that live away or chatting with a group of people. 

Perhaps the original video phones just didn't make sense. They were wired into the wall and unwieldily. Trying to video call with your mother on the sofa with one of those would have felt like you were bench pressing her. Now that's not a situation any of us want to find ourselves in.   But Skype on an iPad? That's quite workable. I wonder if we'd be in the same situation if we all had to buy a dedicated video phone device? I very much doubt many people would want to drop 500 watsits on another device just to gurn at someone on the other end. It's incredible that in an a few years so many of us have devices in our hands or bags that can be repurposed into incredibly sophisticated instruments. We've gone from a world where a device was tailored to a particular task to one where one chameleons itself into others - I'm not convinced my watch needs to tell me I have an email though.  

When I think of vote rigging and corrupt elections my imagination goes to shady men swapping anonymous black boxes or furiously ramming home wads of illegitimate crosses on paper. In the modern age it would appear the tedium of counting mountains of fake ballots  has been sidestepped - well at least in Azerbaijan, who appear to have published the results of their presidential election, before voting had even started. Current president, Ilham Aliyev was winning by a landslide, funny that.